Mākereti Papakura: A Māori First | St Anne's College, Oxford

1873-1930

Mākereti Papakura

Both the header (above - 1998.277.73) and thumbnail (left - 1998.277.98) images are Copyright of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Our thanks to them for the generous permission to use a variety of images form their collection throughout this article.

The recent announcement that Oxford University will be awarding a posthumous degree to Mākereti Papakura, one of our former students and the first known indigenous woman to study at the University, is welcomed by the whole community here at St Anne’s. In honour of her dedicated and pioneering work as an advocate for her culture, we at the library wanted to do our small part in highlighting her incredible life and achievements here on the blog.

Childhood and Community

Mākereti had many names over her lifetime. After her second marriage and during the majority of her time in England, she would have been known as Margaret Staples-Browne, and before that as Margaret Dennan after her first husband. However, Mākereti, the Māori transliteration of Margaret, was a name that she used throughout her life, this article will therefore refer to her as such throughout. Referring to her by her first name only is not intended as a sign of familiarity, only to allow for consistency in address, but for equality, other subjects in this article will be addressed in a similar fashion.

Mākereti was born Margaret Pattison Thom in 1873 in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her mother Pia Ngarotu Te Rihi, was descended from two hapū belonging to the Te Arawa federation (Ngāti Wahiao and Tūhourangi) and her father William Arthur Thom was a Pākehā storekeeper and solider in the Waikato Militia. Mākereti is often referred to as a Māori princess as she was the first born of a respected line of ancestors which can trace its roots back to chiefs from the original settlement of Aoteraroa New Zealand.

Her heritage made her very important to her tribe, and because of this she was raised not by her mother, but by her great uncle and great aunt (her maternal grandfather’s brother and sister). They educated her for the first nine years of her life in the Māori traditions and way of life. Yet with her dual parentage, Mākereti had the opportunity to combine her Māori education with a western one. For five years, starting at age nine, she began to learn English, through a variety of schools and private tutoring. Such a bicultural upbringing was rare at the time, so being able to adeptly navigate both Māori and Pākehā society was a signifcant advantage for Mākereti, and one she would later honour when she drew heavily on her childhood spent learning Māori customs from her elders to inform her research at Oxford.

International Fame

After leaving school, Mākereti put her English skills to use by becoming a guide for western visitors to the Whakarewarewa thermal village in Rotorua, a popular tourist destination both then and now. In 1901, this career brought her international fame when she was chosen as one of the guides to escort the King’s son and his wife, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (later King George V Queen Mary). By this time, Mākereti had already been married once and had a young son, but having recently divorced his father, she was no longer using either her married surname or her family name, instead going by the name ‘Maggie Papakura’. The story behind this new name is that whilst guiding a group of westerners, one was particularly adamant to learn Mākereti’s ‘Māori name’. On the spur of the moment (and perhaps to stop the questions) Mākereti replied that her name was “Papakura”, after the geyser they were currently visiting. Her newfound fame made Mākereti a popular choice for westerners looking for guides to the local area, and she was even able to publish a successful book “Guide to the Hot Lakes District and Some Maori Legends” . It is said that at this point she was so famous that mail addressed just to “Maggie, New Zealand”, would be successfully delivered to her home.

Eventually, despite her success with guiding, disagreements with the local tourism board encouraged her to travel abroad and use her carefully managed fame to promote her culture to the world. She established the Rotorua Māori Choir, which performed in Sydney, and later London, and consisted of about 40 members of her community. They came to London for the Festival of Empire in 1911, and performed both songs and poi dances as well as showcasing other aspects of Māori culture including an entire hand carved Māori village and an early form of film-reel featuring their village back in Rotorua. One of their performances included launching a 45ft Māori canoe at Henley Royal Regatta. Mākereti was a staunch advocate for Māori culture throughout the visit, and was quick to correct misconceptions from visitors to the exhibition, many of whom held typically imperialist views of her people. Despite the media success of the venture, the group’s stint in London was not as financially successful as had been hoped, and Mākereti received a less than warm welcome upon her return to Aotearoa New Zealand, also in part due to the decision of many members of the troupe to remain in London and try to make a living performing to a western audience.

England and The War

While in the UK Mākereti had reacquainted with Richard Staples-Browne, the son of a wealthy landowner from Oddington Grange in Oxfordshire whom she had met four years earlier when he was a member of an expedition that she had guided around Rotorua. It is of little surprise then that soon after her frosty reception at home, Mākereti returned to London and within a few months had married Richard and the pair had moved together to Oddington. By the time of their marriage Mākereti had become tired of the constant press coverage of her everyday activities and was rather displeased that news of her engagement had made it to the papers.

The news was soon to turn to other affairs however as the First World War broke out just a few years later and both Mākereti’s husband and her now adult son from her first marriage, Te Aonui (Francis William) Dennan, served in the armed forces. Richard was made a Captain with the New Zealand medical corps and Te Aonui joined the First New Zealand Expeditionary Force and served in the Gallipoli campaign. Thankfully, both made it through the war largely unscathed. Mākereti herself also undertook war-work, caring for soldiers from Aotearoa New Zealand who ended up in military hospitals in the UK, opening up her home to them and providing some respite and entertainment. During her time in Oddington, Mākereti worshipped at the local church and later chose it as the location for a war memorial for Māori soldiers who fought in the Great War, as well as her eventual burial site.

An Introduction to the University

It was after the war that Mākereti’s association with the University of Oxford began. In 1921 Te Aonui, who had been living with her in Oddington since being discharged, began a degree in anthropology at The Queen’s College. Soon after, in 1922, Mākereti became an associate member of the university’s Anthropology Society, and began donating some of her vast collection of Māori artefacts to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. It was also around this time that she decorated one of the rooms in her home with Māori objects brought with her from Aotearoa New Zealand so that it could be used as a marae, a meeting place far from home. In this space, affectionately dubbed the ‘New Zealand Room’ she held weekly salons where anthropologists and scholars would congregate once a week for discussion and entertainment. Although Mākereti had long hoped to write a book, or series of books, on Māori culture and customs, it may well have been Te Aonui’s degree and her subsequent entry into the world of Oxford’s anthropological community that nudged her towards academia as a facilitator for her work, although her son never completed his diploma.

Mākereti clearly took great joy in sharing her culture and educating others about the Māori way of life as she made a number of public addresses over the next few years, including addresses to the Women’s Institute, a speech as part of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, and a 1927 talk on BBC Radio. In fact, her involvement with the Women’s Institute could have been an additional link to Oxford academia, as it may have been there that she met Grace Hadow who was heavily involved in the WI having been made vice-chairman of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes in 1920. Grace would become a good friend and would later go on to become the Principal of the Society of Oxford Home-Students (later St Anne’s College) with whom Mākereti would study.

Changing Fortunes

In the meantime, however, Mākereti was plagued by misfortune. Both she and her husband suffered bouts of serious illness, and over time their marriage soured, culminating in her filing for divorce in 1923, and making it absolute in 1925. Perhaps in part to try and soothe this spate of bad luck, Mākereti returned home to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1926. She already had ambitions to study at Oxford and she spent much of her time back home discussing her proposed research with her community and consulting with them on traditional Māori life.

Upon returning to England she moved to a new home in North Oxford and, after encouragement from a number of close friends, including Grace Hadow, enrolled with the Society of Oxford Home-Students in the Hilary term of 1927. She applied to study for a degree in anthropology just like her son had done 6 years before. Her supervisors were Henry Balfour, the first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum to whom she had donated a plethora of Māori artefacts, and Ronbert Ranulph Marett who had established the department of Social Anthropology at Oxford a decade or so earlier.

Women were also relatively new to Oxford, having only been granted the right to officially matriculate at Oxford a few years beforehand, so Mākereti was pioneering not just as an indigenous Māori student, but also as a woman, and would likely have been part of a tight-knit community of female academics at Oxford. Despite being such a pioneer, she also seemed to have been widely accepted by the wider anthropological community in Oxford. In March of 1928 she gave a lecture to the Anthropological Society of which she was a member, these talks typically would only have been attended by around twenty people at a time, but 142 members came to listen to Mākereti’s talk on ‘The Māori as He Was’.

Death and 'The Old-Time Māori'

Unfortunately, the chronic muscular rheumatism that had plagued her in recent years had not abated and throughout her preparation of her 30,000-word thesis, Mākereti was constantly having to battle through periods of ill-health. This made conducting her work incredibly fraught, but she was assisted in her studies by her good friend, Rhodes Scholar, and fellow Oxford anthropologist, Thomas Kenneth Penniman. For the final two years of her life, the pair of them would meet three or four times a week and Thomas would take notes while they discussed her thesis, he would then bring them home and type them out. Mākereti would review his typing and re-write the manuscript multiple times until she was satisfied.

The presentation of her completed work to the university was scheduled for the 7th May 1930, but just three weeks shy of her submission, Mākereti fell ill one final time. After a day spent cycling around Oxford her legs became paralysed, Te Aonui arranged for her to spend time at a nursing home to help ease the sever pain she was in, but after she insisted he return home for the evening, a ruptured aneurism caused her lungs to haemorrhage, and she died on the morning of the 16th April.

This left her detailed research, in which she explored the customs of her people, tragically unfinished so close to completion. The work she undertook was unique at the time not only for its insider’s perspective, but also for placing focus on the experience of Māori women specifically, covering topics such as menstruation, childbirth, and the logistics of domestic life. Thankfully, Mākereti’s thesis was posthumously published by Thomas Penniman, in a book titled ‘The Old-Time Māori’. His sensitivity in following both Mākereti’s wishes about what to include, and those of her community in Aotearoa New Zealand to whom he sent the manuscript before publishing, meant that Mākereti’s unique perspective as a representative and participant of Māori culture was preserved. His preservation went even to the point of ending the work mid-sentence where the manuscript Mākereti had given him was cut-off. ‘The Old-Time Māori’ became the first ethnographic study published by a Māori author and is recognised as such by the New Zealand Royal Society.

Mākereti’s Legacy

Despite her death, Mākereti was not forgotten, either by her community back home in Aotearoa New Zealand or here in Oxfordshire. Her grave and the war memorial she erected in Oddington church both attract frequent visitors to this day. Her funeral was well attended by the Oxford community, including by Grace Hadow who was by then the Principal of the Society at which Mākereti studied. Mākereti clearly had a profound affect on the Home-Students as years after her death, she was still a known figure to new undergraduates. One such student, Mary Clarke (read History 1931-1934) wrote to Grace Hadow in 1935 during a visit to Rotorua. She had been told of a memorial to a Māori woman who had died in England. On asking some questions she found it to be a memorial to Mākereti and wrote excitedly to tell Grace Hadow and send her a picture of the memorial in question. She writes that “Guide Susan was very excited to find I knew of her and told me her sister Bella is still living at Rotorua”.

Grace Hadow was clearly very moved by this, as she requested a large print of the photo which Mary provided upon her return later that year. Then, three years later, when Grace herself was given the chance to visit Aotearoa New Zealand as part of a lecture tour the year before her death, she made sure to include a stop at Mākereti’s old home. Whilst there she stayed with Mākereti’s son in Mākereti’s old whare, and in a letter to a friend, expressed delight that everyone in Whakarewarewa remembered ‘Maggie’.

However, the fact that Mākereti never had the chance to receive official recognition for her dedicated work from the University at which she studied has been a longstanding disappointment for many, so it is with great pleasure that St Anne’s sees its former pupil slated to be awarded a posthumous MPhil, in recognition of the quality research she completed. We hope her legacy goes on to inspire generations of students to honour their culture in their pursuit of education.

Bibliography

Mākereti's published works

Papakura, Maggie, Guide to the Hot Lakes District and Some Maori Legends, 1905, Auckland: Brett
Papakura, Mākereti, The Old-Time Maori, 1928, London: Gollancz (https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma990126440220107026)

Sources and Further Reading

Books

Andrews, David, The Two Worlds of Maggie Papakura, 2005, Great Britain: Greenstone Books (https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma990165749290107026)
Diamond, Paul, Makereti: Taking Māori to the World, 2007, Auckland : Random House New Zealand (https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma990165750420107026)
Carreau, Clark, Jelinek, Lilje & Thomas (eds.), Pacific Presences. Volume 2, Oceanic Art and European Museums, 2018, Leiden: Sidestone Press (Ch 23 pp.277-295) (https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/q6b76e/alma991022091051007026)

Articles and More

Northcroft-Grant, June, ‘Papakura, Mākereti – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography’, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, 1996 (https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3p5/papakura-makereti)
Gattey, Emma, ‘Writing Back from the Academy: Uncovering the Unnamed Targets of Makereti’s Revisionist Anthropology’ – Modern Intellectual History, 21(1), 157–187. (https://doi:10.1017/S1479244323000124)
Treagus, Mandy, ‘From Whakarewarewa to Oxford: Makereti Papakura and the Politics of Indigenous Self-Representation – Australian Humanities Review‘, 52, 35-56, (2012) (http://dx.doi.org/10.22459/AHR.52.2012.04)
Diamond, Paul, ‘Remembering Makareti – Te Ahi Kaa mo 7 o Here Turi Koka 2011′, Te Ahi Kaa, 2011 (https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/teahikaa/audio/2495115/te-ahi-kaa-mo-7-o-here-turi-koka-2011)
Gattey, Emma, ‘Makereti : Māori ‘Insider’ Anthropology at Oxford – Oxford and Empire Network’ c.2019 (https://oxfordandempire.web.ox.ac.uk/article/makereti#_edn20)
Rotorua Library, ‘Maggie Papakura of Geyserland – Te Arawa Stories: Digital Storehouse’ (https://www.gtas.nz/maggie-papakura)
Wikipedia, ‘Mākereti Papakura’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81kereti_Papakura)

This article was written by Alice Shepherd (Library Assistant)

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